1 Introduction

The foundation of consistently successful marketing communications lies in thorough planning and strategic preparation. Before you execute digital campaigns, you need to plan them. You need to research and understand your product, your communication challenge, your market, your competitors and, of course, your consumers. We call planning and strategy Think.

Think is the first step in a strategic process:

1. Think: Research, plan and strategise. Use the opportunities of digital to meet communication, market and product challenges. Plan assets and campaigns.
2. Create: Make beautiful assets, from websites and videos to banner adverts and applications.
3. Engage: Use channels to drive traffic to those assets and build relationships with customers.
4. Retain: Use channels to offer consistent value and grow long term customer relationships.
5. Optimise: Track and analyse to understand how assets and campaigns are performing. Derive insight to improve and test assets and campaigns.

Strategy and context tackles how the Internet has changed and challenged the world in which we market, and how best to use digital tools and tactics for effective marketing strategies. We cover the foundations of marketing strategy here.

Understanding customer behaviour focuses on the latest thinking in consumer behaviour, necessary for creating products, services and communications strategies that people actually want to engage with.

Data-driven decision making breaks down the considerations and steps required to truly be a data driven organisation, and explains the advantages gained from harnessing the power of your customer data.

Market research unpacks how to use the Internet to understand audiences and campaigns. The Internet was originally developed as an academic tool for sharing research. This is ideal for savvy marketers.